The Oliver Twins Are Reviving Ghost Hunters Using (Shudder) Generative AI

Spooky in the worst way possible

by Damien McFerran 2:45pm

The Oliver Twins Are Reviving Ghost Hunters Using (Shudder) AI-Generated Visuals 1 — *Image: The Oliver Twins*

The Oliver Twins have been part of the British game development landscape for decades, and have given us classics such as Dizzy, Super Robin Hood, Professional Ski Simulator and, more recently, SkySaga: Infinite Isles.

It would seem that the pair are looking to revisit one of their older classics, but we've got some bad news – the imagery released thus far has clearly been created using Generative AI and not real, human artists.

As shared on the Twins' Facebook account, Ghost Hunters – originally released on the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 in 1987 – is getting a modern-day reboot, complete with Hunk Studbuckle and his partner, Chuck.

The Oliver Twins Are Reviving Ghost Hunters Using (Shudder) AI-Generated Visuals 2 — *Image: The Oliver Twins*

It seems to have been designed for the RichCast platform, built by the Oliver's Panivox studio, formed in 2021. At launch, RichCast was described as a program that allowed users to play through interactive, choice-based stories, with a heavy focus on AI-generated content, such as speech.

Since then, the platform appears to have fully embraced all aspects of Generative AI, and its website is positively dripping with AI-made imagery, video and speech.

Generative AI is a highly debated topic at present. These tools are trained on millions of images and untold hours of footage, often used without the permission of the original copyright holder. GenAI content has high power demands during its creation, which has an environmental impact, and the quality of content online is dropping as AI slop takes over.

Additionally, AI tools are taking work away from artists, developers, animators, voice actors, and other roles – the people who effectively train these tools are the ones most at risk of losing their income. But hey, at least you can create funny videos of celebrities saying rude words, right?

To see two industry greats like Andrew and Philip Oliver readily embrace this technology is somewhat disappointing, especially since they've done so much over their careers to help hundreds of people get started in the video game industry. However, they're hardly alone.

EA has adopted AI in its business, and a recent study showed that a whopping 87% of game developers are using the tech in some way, shape or form. The results, however, aren't always pretty.

Damien has been writing professionally about tech and video games since 2007 and oversees all of Hookshot Media's sites from an editorial perspective. He's also the editor of Time Extension, the network's newest site, which – paradoxically – is all about gaming's past glories.

This comes across as more of an opinion piece than a news article (even though I agree with all your takes on generative AI here).

2
breach187
3:35pm

I don’t support this use of AI, but I also think people are extremely negatively reactive to AI as a whole, even in cases where it’s actually useful and makes sense.
The horror game genre is one place where it could be a good use case for generative AI. One of the biggest issues with horror games is once you’ve identified the mechanics behind everything, the game becomes much less scary. This is something that AI can solve through randomly generated events and unique spooks; things that you can’t just point to the underlying game logic to demystify it. It seems specially suited for games that rely on randomized and tile-based events, like the Diablo series for example.
But I definitely don’t support it taking the place of skilled human labor, and especially not art.

3
Damo
3:41pm

@breach187 What you're describing is procedural generation, and that's been around for decades at this point.

Of course, you could argue that GenAI could be used to create an infinite number of scenarios in such a game. But would they be as coherent as something a person makes?

There are definitely uses for the tech, but replacing artists, making unfunny slop videos and deepfaking famous people seems like a waste of energy IMO.

4
Daniel36
4:22pm

Well, it made you shudder at the sight of just one pic, so I guess good job so far, it's very, very scary already!

5
breach187
4:22pm

@Damo Procedural generation has its limitations. Working alongside generative AI could, theoretically, make it better. That’s what I was trying to get at with my comment.

6
flojomojo
6:13pm

“To see two industry greats like Andrew and Philip Oliver readily embrace this technology is somewhat disappointing, especially since they've done so much over their careers to help hundreds of people get started in the video game industry.”

I don’t disagree, but do you ever get the feeling people who made games we liked are canonized too soon? The Olivers were teenagers when they did their best work, forty years ago. That’s a long time in an industry that changes and evolves so quickly.

I can think of a great many other examples, like “David Crane’s Amazing Tennis,” Tommy Tallarico’s Intellivision Amico, Chris Roberts’s Star Citizen, whatever it is John Romero is up to, and on and on and on.

Doing something cool in the distant past is not a guarantee of future success.

7
gojiguy
6:21pm

Bring on the slop!!!!!!

Cant wait for the inevitable comment from that dude who will complain this is "AI fearmongering"

8
Sn0w
7pm

@Damo 1'000'000% agree!

1. I wish generative AI would be called GAC instead. It stands for Generative Artificial Creation. It also sounds like you're gagging.

2. Bring lazy or cheap and using GAC generated content in a game is no different than using clipart to make a game. No one is going to pay for that. No effort. No profit. What GAC could be used for in a game is perhaps smarter NPCs. Imagine a 16-bit rpg where you might have a farmer who is actually growing in game crops come to a village to buy seeds. You run into him. He's very grumpy. Road bandits stole his money. You decide to hunt bandits, because they have tons of gold. The village is all npcs milling about adding to eachother's story. Dwarf Fortress is kind of like this.

9
Willgraham
7:50pm

Either way, that pic looks terrible!

I want aware of the EA thing or the 87% blimey

@breach187

I think the key here would not using GenAI as part of developing the game, but using GenAI as part of the game engine itself. Which is to say, procedural games already effectively involve "training" the procedural engine to produce the desired array of results in game. Now you could do the exact same thing, only with the much more powerful GenAI tech as the underlying procedural "engine".

Of course, the "problem" with this is that it would require just as much work producing appropriate bespoke art for the training, and labor in doing the training, as it takes with current procedural games. Except that's only a problem if your goal with using GenAI is to produce a magic free "infinite art forever" button. For everyone else, it would just be a tool to do procedural design, only better than before.